WARNEMÜNDE, GERMANY—The Guardian reports that a section of wall stretching for nearly one-half mile was found in the Bay of Mecklenburg, off the coast of Germany, during a survey conducted with a multibeam sonar system. Inspection of the wall revealed that it was made up of about 300 boulders connected with some 1,400 smaller stones. The structure is thought to have been constructed more than 10,000 years ago, near a lake or marsh. Jacob Geersen of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde suggests that the wall may have been part of a driving lane used by hunters in pursuit of reindeer before the area was inundated with almost 70 feet of water some 8,500 years ago. “When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them,” he said. “The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore,” he explained. The rest of the structure, which has been dubbed the “Blinkerwall,” may be buried in sediments. Geersen and his colleagues plan to search the area for animal bones and projectiles as well. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To read about stone caribou-hunting structures that are now submerged beneath Lake Huron, go to "Where the Ice Age Caribou Ranged."
